DOWN THE SWANNY

Printed in the National League South game v Eastbourne Borough Saturday Saturday 9th April 2022  We drew 2-2 in front of 551.

As football club statements go, it was as bizarre as the ‘Freddie Star ate my hamster’ headline. The chairman of Staines Town who has long been in dispute with the owners of the football clubs ground said they would no longer play at Wheatsheaf Park. He said the owners investment firm Downing LLP had breached Russian sanctions and the Modern Slavery Act. Infact he accused the company of financing, ‘environmental crimes, price fixing, deforestation, forced evictions, human rights abuse, child labour, slavery, gender discrimination and murder.’ You know, the sort of qualifications the Premier League would welcome with open arms.

Downing deny all the allegations while the Isthmian League held emergency meetings to see how they could help sort out this mess.

But its been a mess a long-time coming.

Just 10 miles and a river separate Slough and Staines and we’ve been battling it out for 100 years footballing wise and the butt of jokes. Ali G leading the Staines Massive while Slough historically had a poet who wanted us bombed followed by The Office. Officials came up with a cunning plan to portray the town in a better light and rebranded it Staines upon Thames; i'm not sure that they really thought that though properly.

When he took over Staines, Chairman Jo Dixon announced plans for the football league. Instead the Swans look like they are sinking to county level football. His attempt to buy the ground failed. And as James Cave from Against League 3 put it “In reacting in this overly dramatic way, Dixon has almost certainly killed Staines. To fail to finish the season likely means to be ejected from the league. I’m not sure what the lease situation is but fat chance of renewing that again. Dixon inherited a team pushing for promotion once more to the Conference South. Currently, the team is a shadow of what it was, regularly failing to attract a hundred at home. Maybe it’s Dixon’s fault, maybe it’s Downing LLP’s, maybe both. But it’s the supporters, as always, who are left behind again.”

We’ve played each other 67 times but have recently kept passing each other with our combined rise and falls. In our last competitive game we lost 2-0 in 2007 in the league in front of just 178 people when we were slumming it at Windsor. That was our season of hell, homeless and finishing bottom of the Isthmian Premier with just 18 points and conceding 123 goals! I’ve seen us win the League Cup at Staines ground and at one game at Wexham Park the Swans fans serenaded me with ‘Red and yellow and pink and blue, I can see a rainbow’ – a clever dig at my multicolour hair at the time. We know just what a disaster it can be to lose your football ground. It took us 15 years to get back to Slough after we lost ours to an owner who cared little for the Rebels.

I can say from first hand experience that is not easy to run community projects. And football clubs are even harder with supporters demanding never ending success with top clubs splashing ever ludicrous amounts of cash to do so, with its detrimental effect across the football pyramid. Tracey Crouch’s planned governance reforms can’t come soon enough - although already the top clubs are mobilising to water it down.

Governance is such a boring subject but its essential. Not the type of governance that stifles innovation – but that stops property vultures making rich pickings from community assets.

Down in Brighton, a storm kicked off about a bloke who said all the right things about a pub he bought on a whim. Like you do. He announced he would turn it into a place for Ukrainian refugees but wanted others to raise the money to make it happen. A worthy cause but people rightly challenged his plans asking that if they were putting in money they would want a say in the assets, rather than him making a tidy profit. So he got builders to start ripping down the locally listed green tiles, it seems in an act of spite. The council stopped them but not before a lot of damage had been done.

Lots of developers buy pubs, run them down then fling their hands in the air and say look they are unviable. When I hear this all I can think of is ‘what if this was a football club.’

Your team are rubbish, they are losing every week and are bottom of the league. Worse your drowning in debt. Close them down I hear you sing, they’ve become unviable. Or how about this: change the management, players and run it a bit better. They start winning games, more people come and watch them and hey presto, look they are viable again.

There are countless examples of developers not getting there way and pulling out the matches or sending in the bulldozers. So hats off to Westminster Councils approach to the company that knocked down the Carlton Tavern. After being denied planning permission to convert it into 10 flats, and two days before Historic England was due to recommend the pub be granted Grade-II listed status, the owners ordered its demolition. Fast forward six years and after an unprecedented court order the developers were made to rebuild it brick by brick.

James Watson, the pub protection adviser for the Campaign for Pubs, advised the Carlton campaign. “I never imagined that I would see a planning inspector order a developer to put back what he’d just knocked down, to look exactly as it was. I thought the developer would get a slap on the wrist, a £6,000 fine. But I was flabbergasted – and it has set an incredibly useful precedent. Other planning inspectors will remember it, and so will developers.”

With public services cut to the bone, prices skyrocketing and a loneliness epidemic exasperated by covid, places where people can meet are more important than ever. I’m involved in one of those. The Bevy is the only community owned pub on a housing estate in the UK. It seems impossible to make a profit but it’s so much more than just a pub. A community centre that delivers everything from meals on wheels for vulnerable people, training for people with learning disabilities, art clubs, lunch clubs, job clubs, free children’s parties  - we even grow our own food. You name it we serve it up. It’s social value means it is something worth investing in but something that is unviable if you just measure life in pounds, shillings and pence.

It’s time property vultures were given last orders and our community assets were protected for everyone, be that football clubs or pubs, community centres and village halls. In the meantime its supporters of clubs like Staines Town who find themselves collateral damage. And no doubt it will be these same fans that eventually get the club out of the mess they now find themselves in.